collective narrative

SKAM (a Norwegian word meaning “shame”) is a Norwegian television show for teens, written and directed by Julie Andem for NRK, and had its fourth and final season in spring 2017. Each season, the show followed a different teen in an Oslo high school, and it has dealt with topics such as sexual harassment, mental illness, same-sex-relationships, drug use and Islamophobia.

This presentation analyses how the popular Norwegian show SKAM used social media as its main narrative platform. The paper uses narratology as well as contemporary theories of distributed narrative (Walker, 2005) and transmedia narrative (Dena, 2009; Ryan, 2013) to analyse how SKAM develops storylines across multiple media. It will compare this to works of electronic literature that have pioneered similar techniques, and relate the intense engagement of fans on the official site and independent sites to fan fiction studies and to net prov. 

A key feature of SKAM is that it is published online first. Traditional Friday-night broadcast episodes are compilations of video clips published almost daily on http://skam.p3.no, where fans also screenshots of text conversations and occasional Instagram photos. In addition, many of the characters have Instagram accounts where content is often released without being featured on the official website. SKAM has become popular well beyond its target audience of Norwegian 16-19 girls, with a large international fan base providing translations and extensive discussions and analyses on Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.

Brief entry on collaborative narrative situating collaboration in hypertext and online writing contexts.

Collaboratively written narratives are not specific to new media: a number of works within the Western cultural and literary canon, for example the epics of Homer, the Judeo-Christian Bible, and Beowulf, are believed to have been developed through collaborative storytelling and writing processes. It can however be said that collaborative writing practices are more prevalent in contemporary digital media than in print.

Electronic literature authors most often write within software platforms that are themselves “authored”—every time someone opens up Photoshop, or Flash, they are reminded of the long list of developers who actually wrote the software. So even making use of a particular application is a type of collaboration. There is a greater degree of transparency to the collective efforts involved in digital media production than to traditional literary production.

(Source: Author's introduction)

Janet Murray writes, “The kaleidoscopic powers the computer offers us…might also lead to compelling narratives that capture our new situation as citizens of a global community. The media explosion of the past one hundred years has brought us face-to-face with particular individuals around the world without telling us how to connect with them” (282). This assertion points to the transforming effects digital media are now having on the ways that we experience representational arts following the advent of digital technology, and points to some of the potential setbacks that Internet-based narrative might embody. This paper will investigate these implications as they relate to narrative trajectory and possibility through analysis of Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph’s networked novel Flight Paths (2009).

One of the greatest assets of using Internet-based technologies resides in the potential for these technologies to expand the possibilities for action and interaction among people disbursed through time and space. Flight Paths hearkens to the beginnings of a return to the notion of reading and writing as a social activity and the reestablishment of literature to historical “oral” traditions. In this presentation, I will identify the implications of communal narratives developed via digital means, exploring the potentials of networked narrative spaces as they apply to the larger field of narrative. The potentials for this and other socially generated electronic texts collapse time, space, or both through the instantaneously reciprocal possibilities inherent to works that exist within the digital realm. The Internet and its instant communication possibilities allow for a further change in digital narratives that return us to some of our earliest narrative roots.

This return to early narrative traditions is perhaps one of the most important ways in which narrative is becoming increasingly mimetic in the wake of digital technologies, pointing to the ways in which electronic literature may be positioning itself to become a hyperreal cultural stand-in for real-life narrative exchanges. Flight Paths is a text that connects global readers and allows for continual streams of data incorporation into the narrative. Many other authors are pursuing this trend through Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, illustrating a drift towards collaborative, continually updated narrative strategies that are further pushing us towards Baudrillard’s conception of the simulacra as indicative of our 21st-century reality. If fictionalized narratives can convincingly-enough simulate real-life experiences of their content, while simultaneously replicating interpersonal exchanges of said narrative and further overstepping the limiting possibilities of the tangible world through digital means, what is to stop them from assuming the revered place of the hyperreal that our culture already so highly values? This paper will connect these seemingly contradictory threads, asserting that Flight Paths and other similar works are moving us in two directions simultaneously – towards a group-centered oral culture of the past that is likewise a marker of the hyperreal ideals of the future.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

Revision of essay previously titled "All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective. Narratives, and Architectures of Participation."

This essay explores the history and methodologies of collective narrative projects, and their relationship to collective knowledge projects and methodologies. By examining different forms of conscious, contributory, and unwitting participation, the essay develops a richer understanding of successful large-scale collaborative projects. The essay then examines large-scale architectures of participation in Wikipedia and Flickr to extrapolate from those observations potential methodologies for the creation of collective narratives.